Why Am I in Lockdown
The Delta strain of the coronavirus has spread across Sydney and an effective mechanism for curtailing its spread and therefore its impact is to restrict the movement and interaction of people, thereby reducing the possibility of infection. Lockdown, aka house detention, is where we’re at. No matter where you live you’ve either already been locked down, are currently locked-down, or will soon be locked down.
This lockdown was originally hoped to last only two weeks, but, like all lockdowns, has now been extended. The announcement of the extension, foretold by the daily numbers, opens the door to frustration, with despair visible further down the corridor.
Magnanimity receded quickly; I, like many, searched for someone to blame for my predicament. I have done nothing wrong; I have not been a close or casual contact; I do not live in or near a hot spot.
Why am I in lockdown?
The prevailing view among the myopic is that this extension to the lockdown is due to those people in south-western Sydney; they didn’t follow the rules; they continued to visit each other; they went shopping; they have big families all crammed into the one house. It’s the Muslims. It’s their fault we’re in this.
Yes, it’s them, I muttered to myself. It’s their fault that the virus escaped from a quarantine centre for overseas arrivals ….
Hearing myself think those words is enough to snap myself out of my self-pity, arrest the momentary lapse of reason and trigger my own thinking, rather than relying upon the opinions of bigots or the narrative provided by media closely aligned to a flailing government.
It is now almost 18 months since Australia closed its borders, and when doing so the Prime Minister was careful to point out that the closure may well be for some time. Since that time not a single dedicated, permanent or temporary, overseas arrival quarantine facility has been planned, let alone built and in operation. Not one.
Why am I in lockdown? Because Australia’s borders were never truly closed to arrivals, only to citizens departing. Even though it is almost 18 months since Australia announced this partial closing of the border, we continue to quarantine overseas arrivals in central CBD multi-story hotels with insufficient air-conditioning to limit the possibility of cross-contamination. That is why I am in lockdown – not because the people of Fairfield continued to visit each other, but because the staff who work in a hotel that functions as a quarantine centre for a highly infectious disease must traverse the largest and most densely populated city on the continent to travel to and from work, infecting people as they go.
Sydney processes half of all overseas arrivals, placing its residents at greater risk of infection than any other city in the country, and hence at greater risk of being locked-down. What benefits accrue to me from living with this risk – none. I am rarely free to travel around the country, and barred from leaving the country. And yet I am locked in my house due to the travels of others.
Who are these people arriving into this country during a pandemic? Why is that question not asked by the Facebookers who implore me to ‘do the right thing – stay home’. Why aren’t they asking why it is that we have so many arrivals when none of us are allowed to leave. According to this article here, there were 20,000 arrivals into Australia during the month of June; few of these are returning citizens, with many being tourists and guest workers.
So is that why I am in lockdown, because we continue to import workers during a pandemic when we are not allowed to leave our homes.
Vaccinations! If only everybody had bothered to get vaccinated, then we wouldn’t be in lockdown – the lecture given by the very people who know full well that the Federal Government has not procured enough supplies of the various vaccines for us all to be vaccinated.
In the early days of the lockdown the NSW government pursued the possibility of charges against the shuttle driver who was considered to be patient zero for this outbreak. Take a moment and consider not just the utter absurdity of that action – blaming a lowly worker with no decision making authority for all the failures of policy that placed you and me in lockdown – but the detestable deceit associated with that action. Blaming the worker shifts the discussion away from the failures of government and implies that we are in this position through our fault, when in fact there has now been ample time, knowledge and resources for the development of a different approach for managing the risks associated with inbound travellers.
